In a virtualized environment, virtual network interface controllers (VNICs) are instantiated in a virtualization layer (also referred to herein as the “hypervisor”) supporting virtual machines (VMs) and are programmed to behave similarly to physical NICs (PNICs). One feature both PNICs and VNICs have supported is receive side scaling (RSS), which involves computing a hash of incoming packet header attributes and distributing the incoming network traffic across CPUs for processing based on the computed hash values. Packets belonging to the same connection are distributed to the same RSS queue, based on the computed hash value, for processing by a particular CPU. For VNICs in particular, RSS is traditionally handled by the hypervisor, and the RSS processing causes CPU overhead.